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Engineering 1984

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While catching up with the nettime mailing list, I came across two articles that give me the creeps.

Nick Pickles, director of privacy and civil liberties campaign group Big Brother Watch, said: ‘It’s been a fact that modern phones are in reality tracking devices that let us make calls, but the idea that awkward citizens might find their phone shut down at the behest of a Government agency is a very worrying thought and not one that fits with democratic principles.’

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A sea change in international development

A few years ago, I could not have imagined myself ever considering the World Bank a shining light on what needs to happen in international development. But today’s TED talk by Sanjay Pradhan, vice president of the World Bank Institute, is such a shining example.

We come to this crossroads from very different directions, but in choosing where to go next, I find myself more and more in the company of organisations I never thought would go “my way”, while some of the more radically progressive friends from the past are hesitating.

Twitter puts the bird in a cage

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photo: Pat Pilon, via flickr, CC-BY-20

When I came across Twitter, years ago, it first looked like another chat service. But with the ability to interact via SMS, and easy ways to feed tweets into websites and applications, it quickly became a rich ecosystem for exchanging all kinds of status updates. You see metro lines on twitter, announcing disruptions in services.

It seems the days of the free ecosystem are over, and Twitter is joining the Closed Silos Club to monetise my social connections.

Twitter was a platform that was very open for messages coming in and going out through dozens, even hundreds of applications. Together with similar services like Jaiku, and open source versions like identi.ca (Status.net), it looked like the beginning of federated social networks, at least for such status streams.

It could be something like email, or chat via Jabber or IRC: you can communicate with others, regardless of whether you use the same service (Gmail, Hotmail, your own) or tools (Thunderbird, Outlook). And you could contribute to the common infrastructure by setting up your own server.

This ability to contribute to the infrastructure is what is key to the success of the internet. In peer-to-peer applications, this even is made so easy that most people don’t even realise they are contributing: BitTorrent, Skype, Spotify, the key to success is that not everything has to go through a central entity.

But over the last months, Twitter has started to focus on “ delivering a consistent Twitter experience “.

What that means is that I loose. One by one, the connections I made between websites and tools will be terminated.

Instead of being the source, it is turning into the sink of status updates on my networked profiles, a place where I dump updates made on other platforms, and where I will (for how long?) mostly interact during conferences.

Twitter introduced “Cards” which look remarkably like Facebook or Google+ status updates. But I don’t need another Facebook-style destination (like another Google+ ghost town). What I liked about Twitter was the wide variety of ways to interact. I don’t want a company-dictated “consistent Twitter experience”, I want to interact around status updates.

As a content publisher, I don’t need yet another social graph and more markup language. Or a provider who insists on monitoring everything I and my visitors do.

Apparently, the new terms for the API say:

“Don’t resyndicate data. If your service consumes Twitter data, don’t take that data and expose it via an API, post it to other cloud services, and so on.”

As if Google would forbid me to forward an email in my Gmail account with anything other than their web client.

My tweets were free, now they have to live in a cage…

Newsletter February 2012

In this newsletter:

  • a wrap-up of the past Open Tea and announcement of the next one.
  • an update on international aid data networking
  • current developments on the IATI NGO working group

Open Tea

On December the 8th the Open for Change network had its first Open Tea at the Amlab in Amterdam, to look back at the past year and discuss where we will be heading in 2012.

Mark Tiele Westra from Akvo presented openaid.nl, an initiative that makes open data on Dutch development aid visualized and searchable.
Marijn Rijken from TNO informed  and invited us to participate on a research project on the effects of open data for the development sector.

We discussed the organization of the Open for Change network. Evident in the discussion was the important role the Open for Change network holds in connecting, exchanging and supporting open data initiatives and knowledge in the development sector. How this role should be filled in is something we are working on in 2012.

We want to thank the 1%CLUB, Akvo and TextToChange for hosting the open tea in the gorgeous Amlab, and hope to see you there again at the next Open Tea: March 8th, 15:00- 17:00 and after that Open drinks!

International networking

At various meet-ups at conferences in 2011, we discussed ways to strengthen the international network of open aid data activists.

In November, we submitted a proposal for a European Aid Data Network to the EuropeAid budget line of the European Commission, led by AidInfo in the UK, with Partos (NL), FORS (CZ), ACEP (PT), IGO (PL) and the Open Knowledge Foundation (UK). We hope to hear by early March whether we are invited to submit a full proposal.

In the meantime, AidInfo has asked Claudia Schwegmann of OpenAid.de to continue building out this emerging European network. We had a first conference call last Tuesday, and plan to have the next one on March 2nd.

To create joint channels of communication, we invite you all to:

  1. Join the open-development mailing list to discuss international open aid data: http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/open-development
  2. Track our guide of open aid data-related events, and submit yours: http://lanyrd.com/guides/open-aid-data/

IATI and NGOs

The IATI NGO Working Group is a CSO-led forum that was created with the approval of the IATI Steering Committee to discuss the application of the IATI Standards to the work of CSOs and to present practical proposals on CSO-specific approaches to publication of IATI compatible data.

The CSO Working Group is co-chaired by Beris Gwynne, representing the International NGO Charter of Accountability Company, and Brian Tomlinson, representing the CSO Open Forum.

Both Partos and Open for Change are represented in the group, and we’re aiming to organise an “intervision meeting” for Dutch NGOs in March.

The next peer reference meeting is planned for beginning of March. The first general consultation will hopefully take place in April 2012. Read more on our blog!

Got news?

If you want to bring in subjects or interesting news for next newsletter, you are more than welcome: send your contributions to info@openforchange.info

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Who is implementing the aid transparency agreement?

Owen Barder published an overview by the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) on how far countries and donors are on their road map to publish their aid spending data before the High Level Meeting in Busan, end of this month.

If you’re curious about how the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) can help aid effectiveness, have a look at their video with some stakeholders:

The International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) from Development Initiatives on Vimeo.

Peter Eigen: Overcoming the fear of transparency

We've participated in two interesting events in the last two weeks: the Open Aid Data Conference in Berlin, and the IATI in the Visigrad countries conference in Prague. A proper post is still due, but here's already a video of the closing talk from Transparency International's founder Peter Eigen, "Overcoming the fear of transparency":

[openaiddata.de] Peter Eigen – Overcoming the fear of transparency from Open Knowledge Foundation on Vimeo.

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Dutch development data and results online

../../../assets/posts/bb21848612edc9fd9e03b903a0047562_MD5.jpgToday, Ben Knapen, the Dutch State Secretary for development cooperation, presented the “Resultatenrapportage”, the “reporting of results” on Dutch efforts in development aid in the period 2009-2010. He used the occassion to also present the first release of Dutch government data in the IATI standard format, making The Netherlands the fifth signatory to deliver on its commitment for phase 1 of the IATI agreement.

The “Resultatenrapportage” report itself is the result of the collaboration of some two hundred writers from government and NGOs, in a process led by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Partos, the Dutch platform of organisations in development cooperation.

To make the report a stepping stone towards sharing more data online, it is no longer being printed, but instead made available as PDF document, with links to offer easy access to background documents and data.

At the same time, the State Secretary announced the opening of http://www.minbuza.nl/opendata with the first set of spending data released, up to date to the end of the second quarter of 2011.

Behind the scenes, the last bits are put in place to automatically register the data at the IATI registry. The data will be udpated quarterly, so the next release is expected to already happen in early October.

It will be interesting to see how the regular publication of the data leads to continuous improvement of the data: less jargon, less abbreviations, clearer descriptions.

In addition to the IATI data, there also is a set of documents of embessies, reporting on the progress of particular projects in countries around the world. An open challenge is to now find ways to link the information in these documents to the data available in IATI.

Knapen expects civil society to also publish their data in IATI, so that it becomes easier to look directly into the operations and processes happening at the core of international development cooperation.

The Guardian has made a website to slice and dice the data of the World Bank, DFID, etc. In collaboration with Akvo, the Ministry is doing a pilot project to show their water project portfolio, but Knapen hopes that parties in The Netherlands will also explore the expanding universe of data to answer their own questions and develop their own perspective on what is happening.

After offering the report on a (symbolic) USB stick to Nebahat Albayrak of the Parliamentary committee for foreign affairs, she said she hopes the open data will make the political debates more informed and perhaps even a bit more objective, but also stressed the importance of reflecting on actual impacts as done in the “Resultatenrapportage”.

Albayrak also hopes to also evaluate the “resultatenrapportage” and the “open data” initiatives and standards from the perspective of effectiveness for their work in the “kamercommissie”.

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Smarter crowdsourcing

Paul Currion has written a critique on Ushahidi and crowdsourcing in humanitarian crises. I think he misses quite a bit of what actually went on, it’s like me judging the effectiveness of institutional aid based on what I see and hear on TV. Robert Munro has answered Paul’s critique with a more in-depth review of what happened and didn’t show up on Ushahidi.

I do agree with Paul’s (somewhat hidden) observation that tapping into an existing infrastructure (in the case of Haiti: the Open Street Map community) is a next step. I’d generalise that: tap into an existing social infrastructure. Consider the Haitian diaspora as such.

One way to look at crowdsourcing is as "a random group of people connected by technology figuring out processes to address a one-off goal". But that’s still a rather centralised view: an unconnected mass of people coming together like a flash mob.

A better way would be to consider socio-technical architectures: groups of people connected by technology, establishing (new) patterns of collaboration for on-going goals. That’s more a peer-to-peer view: an ad-hoc configuration of groups of people with different skills coming together to address a complex situation.

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ResRap 3, 2, 1, Go!

Two weeks ago the #resrap 2009-2010 project kicked off at the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs: the biannual reporting of results of Dutch international development aid. It’s the second time the Ministry works together with civil society (this time at a more ambitious level through Partos 1) to report on our joint Dutch contributions to the Millennium Development Goals as completely as possible.

Earlier, I used the 6-minute film “ A Case For Open Data In Transit” to illustrate my drive as member of the #resrap web advisory group, to not just collect data for analysis, but also make it available as raw data. Using the approach presented by Joshua Robin at the Gov 2.0 Expo 2010, last May: Focus on 3-2-1.

The current focus in the plan is to collect raw data, and then

  1. Let various groups analyse the data and write chapters on each of the Millennium Development Goals.
  2. Publish those as a book and a website by September 2011, and
  3. Then to have a look at how to further make things available in a joint website, perhaps enabling others to download the data in raw form.

But why let the still mostly untapped reservoir of positively motivated talents and expertise (data analists, programmers, journalists, and so on) wait a year? They can come into action right now!

  1. Make the raw data available while collecting it. The tedious task for the ICT and Monitoring&Evaluation employees to provide data dumps turns into an engaging conversation on what is needed to make the data available publicly, in real-time, and what then can be done. Let’s start our own sector-wide /Open campaign!
  2. More people can help debunk myths, find new angles to present what we do, compare between countries, create benchmarks on topics, provide new services to organisations or companies.
  3. And we will have more tools, presentations, engagement, and insights available by the time the ResRap is ready.

To quote Tim O’Reilly once more: governments should be a platform, not a service. “Do the least possible, not the most possible, to enable others to build on what you do.”

We are already quite a bit on the way, so it’s not a radically different approach, just a radically different output.

  • Data on outputs and financial inputs of projects is relatively easy to get (of course, still with plenty of problems to solve). It will help to compare what is available and try to build mash-ups, to feed the discussion towards joint standards.
  • Data on outcomes is harder to aggregate, and requires a priori agreements between parties on how projects will be evaluated.
    • Within the Ministry, there are discussions on how to establish indicators that might be required from grantees under the Dutch MFS2 Programme 2.
    • Also, several people involved in the field of Monitoring & Evaluation formed an informal network to discuss “M&E 2.0” and how to create new ways of reporting results in a peer-to-peer and low-treshold manner.

Let’s go!

Next Thursday at PartosPlaza, transparency and open data are hot topics. There will be a workshop with the “M&E 2.0” people, and one with our ISHub friends and fans. And Tony German of AidInfo will explain why the International Aid Transparency Initiative is relevant for private aid organisations. Then in November, Dutch open data fans will go to the Open Government Data Camp in London. Plenty of opportunities to make progress on this topic!

1 “Partos is the national platform for Dutch civil society organisations in the international development cooperation sector”

2 In November, the Ministry will announce the budgets allocated to around 30 coalitions of organisations for the period 2011-2015, in total up to around 450 million Euro per year.

Clay Shirky as my Sound Byte Hero

I haven’t managed to write (publicly) for some time: new projects kept me busy, either launching, or preparing. But thanks to a tweet by Planspark, I read (yet another) piece by someone who is becoming my personal “Sound Byte Hero”: Clay Shirky. At the moment, Siegfried Woldhek and I are preparing a position paper on how International Development Cooperation will change, as part of a series of debates with existing organisations and the Minister for Development Cooperation here in The Netherlands. So when my friend Tim Bonnemann send out a tweet today “Must-read of the day: Clay Shirky’s “Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable”, I summarised the take-away quotes for me.

My personal selection of “quotable quotes” from Clay Shirky’s “Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable”

“With the old economics destroyed, organizational forms perfected for industrial production have to be replaced with structures optimized for digital data. It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves — the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public — has stopped being a problem.”

“As novelty spread, old institutions seemed exhausted while new ones seemed untrustworthy; as a result, people almost literally didn’t know what to think. If you can’t trust Aristotle, who can you trust?”

“And so it is today. When someone demands to know how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won’t break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be told that ancient social bargains aren’t in peril, that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading information will improve previous practice rather than upending it. They are demanding to be lied to.
There are fewer and fewer people who can convincingly tell such a lie.”

““You’re gonna miss us when we’re gone!” has never been much of a business model”

“Imagine, in 1996, asking some net-savvy soul to expound on the potential of craigslist, then a year old and not yet incorporated. The answer you’d almost certainly have gotten would be extrapolation: “Mailing lists can be powerful tools”, “Social effects are intertwining with digital networks”, blah blah blah. What no one would have told you, could have told you, was what actually happened: craiglist became a critical piece of infrastructure. Not the idea of craigslist, or the business model, or even the software driving it. Craigslist itself spread to cover hundreds of cities and has become a part of public consciousness about what is now possible. Experiments are only revealed in retrospect to be turning points.”

““If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?” The answer is: Nothing will work, but everything might. Now is the time for experiments, lots and lots of experiments, each of which will seem as minor at launch as craigslist did, as Wikipedia did, as octavo volumes did.”

“Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism.”

“No one experiment is going to replace what we are now losing with the demise of news on paper, but over time, the collection of new experiments that do work might give us the reporting we need.”